The Berlin smartphone bank is changing from a German GmbH to a German stock corporation.
(Photo: dpa)
Frankfurt The Berlin smartphone bank N26 continues to prepare for a possible future IPO: It is converting the previous GmbH into a German stock corporation (AG) – and is also naming a supervisory board. The company announced this on Thursday morning.
The conversion into an AG is the prerequisite for the future success of N26, said co-founder and co-CEO Valentin Stalf in a press conference. It also strengthens corporate governance. The rules of good company management are referred to as corporate governance.
And the step is above all necessary in order to be able to go public at all in the future. N26 CFO Jan Kemper recently emphasized that there are currently no plans for an IPO (Initial Public Offering). “If you look at the market out there, this is not a time to start talking about IPOs,” he said. If the situation on the markets improves and the N26 owners aim for this “logical next step”, the bank will be prepared for it. N26 has at least achieved the necessary legal form.
In the future, the Supervisory Board will consist of five members. Marcus Mosen, who has been active in the industry for around 20 years and was previously head of the payment service provider Concardis, will become chairman of the supervisory board. Mosen is also among the earliest N26 investors.
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His deputy will be Jörg Gerbig, head of organization at the Just Eat Takeaway food delivery service. The board is completed by Barbara Roth, Julian Deutz and Robert Kilian.
Roth takes care of regulation
Roth has headed Group Audit at Deutsche Börse since the beginning of the year. She takes care of the topic of regulation on the N26 supervisory board.
Deutz, Chief Financial Officer at Axel Springer, will in turn chair the Audit and Risk Committee, and Kilian will chair the Nomination Committee and the Compensation Committee. Among other things, he works as a lecturer at the Humboldt University in Berlin and teaches on the topics of regulation and entrepreneurship.
At the Handelsblatt banking summit, the N26 founder promised to buy other fintechs.
(Photo: Marc-Steffen Unger for Handelsblatt)
However, there are no employee representatives on the Supervisory Board. According to the current size of the company, there is no employee participation, said Stalf, who founded N26 in 2013 together with Maximilian Tayenthal. “We comply with the legal requirements,” says the Co-CEO.
N26 was valued at 7.7 billion euros last year. According to its own statements, the Berlin smartphone bank has over eight million customers in 24 countries.
The German financial regulator Bafin believes that N26 has grown too quickly for many years and has not evolved its processes and controls accordingly. In November last year, the authority therefore sent a special representative to the bank and ordered that N26 be allowed to accept a maximum of 50,000 new customers per month.
The appointment of Roth is a clear sign that the Supervisory Board takes the issue of regulation very seriously and gives it a very high priority, said Mosen.
Meanwhile, N26 is already considering the next step: the conversion into a European company (Societas Europaea, SE). As a European bank, it is logical to take this step at some point, Mosen said. Stalf gave a time frame of around twelve months for this.
More: N26 Co-CEO Valentin Stalf – “We want to be profitable in the next 24 months”